UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)

Search UvA-DARE

Susceptibility of pollinators to ongoing landscape changes depends on landscape history

Journal

Diversity and distributions

Volume | Issue number

21 | 10

Pages (from-to)

1129-1140

Document type

Article

Faculty

Faculty of Science (FNWI)

Institute

Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED)

Abstract

AimPollinators play an important role in ecosystem functioning, affecting also crop production. Their decline may hence
lead to serious ecological and economic impacts, making it essential to understand the processes that drive pollinator shifts
in space and time. Land-use changes are thought to be one of the most important drivers of pollinators’ loss, and there is
increasing investment on pollinator-friendly landscape management. However, it is still unclear whether landscape history
of a given region determines how pollinator communities respond to further landscape modification.

LocationThe
Netherlands.

MethodsUsing geographically explicit historical landscape and pollinator data from the Netherlands,
we evaluated how species richness changes of three important pollinator groups (bees, hoverflies and butterflies) are affected
by landscape changes related to habitat composition, fragmentation and species spillover potential and whether such effects
depend on the historical characteristics of the landscape.

ResultsThe effect of landscape changes varied between
different pollinator groups. While bumblebee richness benefited from increases in edges between managed and natural systems,
other bees benefited from increases in landscape heterogeneity and hoverfly richness was fairly resistant to land-use changes.
We found that for the majority of the pollinators past landscape characteristics conditioned, the more recent pollinator richness
changes. Landscapes that historically had more suitable habitat were more susceptible to display hoverfly declines (caused
by drivers not considered in this study). Landscapes that historically had greater spillover potential were more likely to
suffer butterfly richness declines and the bumblebee assemblages were more susceptible to the effects of fragmentation.Main
conclusions

The diversity of responses of the pollinator groups suggest that multispecies approaches that take group-specific
responses to land-use change into account are highly valuable. These findings emphasize the limited value of a one-size-fits-all
biodiversity conservation measure and highlight the importance of considering landscape history when planning biodiversity
conservation actions.

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations

If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let
the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible
and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library, or send a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
You will be contacted as soon as possible.